By Phil Vorvis
As I was walking through MacEwan Hall, I was approached by someone dressed completely in black. She gave me a piece of paper marked with the familiar eyeball embedded in a pyramid that appears on the back of the American one-dollar bill. This had a vague meaning to me.
Nov. 27 was dedicated to curbing consumer spending in order to show corporate whores who really controls the market; the consumers. The day was also to show big business that it can’t continually feed us pop culture and expect us to buy it all.
Buy Nothing Day is not a bad idea, but there are flaws in its method and theory. Not buying anything isn’t a constructive solution to the problems of our MTV-brainwashed culture. In fact, it hurts business and the economy. Without sales, the economy would grind to a halt, the dollar would be worthless and you, whether or not you participated, would suffer.
The theory that industry spoon-feeds us culture is somewhat true but we, the consumers, are still in control. In fact Buy Nothing Day is in effect 365 days a year. We control product selection with our “dollar votes.” Every successful product exists because we chose to vote for it. This is consumer sovereignty.
Buying nothing doesn’t prove our sovereignty. If you marched that day waving a black flag, maybe you should rethink how capitalism really works and how we have the power to choose what we want for ourselves.